You Never Forget Your First: Tammy and the T-Rex (Gore Edition)

Michael (Paul Walker) is a teenage guy in love with cheerleader Tammy (Denise Richards). Tammy loves him, too, and even her best friend, righteous, gay, Black man Byron (Theo Forsett) is enamored with the guy. He should be on easy street. Unfortunately, Tammy’s ex-boyfriend Billy (George Pilgrim) is a possessive creep with a little gang of sociopathic sycophants to do his bidding. When he catches Michael rubbing his rhubarb (so to speak), he does what any sensible psychopath does: beating Michael to a pulp and then dropping him off in a big cat park to let the beasts do his dirty work for him. While in critical condition, Michael falls under the attention of the mad Dr. Wachenstein (Terry Kiser) who is looking for the perfect brain to stuff into his animatronic T-rex, and Michael is the lucky victim volunteer. Before long, Michael is up and running around, angry at Billy and his crew, furious at Dr. Wachenstein and his crew, and still yearning for Tammy. Sadly, he is stuck inside a several ton animatronic dinosaur body. With a terrific supporting cast including Ellen Dubin as the insanely hot mad science henchwoman Helga, George “Buck” Flower and Ken Carpenter as manly men deputies, Sean Whalen as Billy’s punk number one, J. Jay Saunders as the beleaguered sheriff (and Byron’s dad), John Franklin as a lippy/passive-aggressive computer scientist, the original gory horror/sf/comedy Tammy and the T-Rex (1994) is an absolute treat of 1990s over-the-top laughs and wonderful weirdness shot on the cheap and shot fast, but with a delirious genius that is so damned charming.

You never forget your first. This is true of love, of course, but it’s equally true of the first exposure to Tammy and the T-Rex. For Trista and me, this occurred in October 2019 at Houston’s Graveyard Fest, a horror movie film festival curated by Alamo Drafthouse programmer Robert Saucedo. He had caught the movie at some other film festival earlier that year and enthused about it. It was one of the highlights of that particular film festival for us, the movie we wanted desperately to see and one of the two that we immediately wanted to own to revisit. As it turned out, pre-orders went live for the Blu-ray/DVD the following Black Friday from a distributor I was unfamiliar with at the time, a little outfit called Vinegar Syndrome. Well, we got the disk and have revisited it quite a few times (as well as the supplemental features, including interviews with Denise Richards and director/co-writer Stewart Raffill. We got to revisit the movie again this past February as a part of the Joe Bob Briggs special double feature on SHUDDER (it was paired with Anna Biller’s 2016 film, The Love Witch, another overlooked gem). In addition to being a fun little flick, it also opened the floodgates on my infatuation with VinSyn’s catalog (a treasure trove of oddities and enjoyable cinema, some of which might be better made than Tammy and the T-Rex, but few of which have had quite the game-changing impact on my brain), which has led to hours of wonderfully wonky viewing, thousands of dollars of purchases over the years, as well as the introduction of Weird Watch Wednesday series, which has been running strong since October, 2020 … So, this one little movie has had quite an impact on my life.

I suppose this is another example of those flicks that I find myself having a difficult time removing from life events and personal experience, thus rendering me biased. It’s in good company, I suppose, appearing in my own personal awesome cabinet alongside flicks like Aliens (1986), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Critters (1986), Night of the Comet (1984), Night of the Creeps (1986), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982), etc. Many of those movies walloped my brain when I was a kid, this along with Audition (1999), is an example of the movies that came along later in life but hit me in the same way.

The movie was conceived, written, and shot, in under a month a time pressure that arose due to a hard delivery date for the animatronic dinosaur, which the producer had access to prior to its deployment at a Texas park. A phone call comes in saying the dino is only available for three weeks, can you make a movie, and Stewart Raffill agreed to the gig, as you do. Six days later, he and writing partner Gary Brockette had a screenplay, days later they had talent, and days after that they started shooting. The interviews with the cast and crew on the VinSyn discs (as well as the deep background on the Joe Bob Briggs’ Valentine’s Day special) recount some of the funnier aspects of the filming and background, such as the production’s paying off a fire marshal in order to continue shooting as wildfires raced into their location. As well, there’s much attention given to the fact that the distributor found all this gory horror stuff unlikeable and performed his own editing on the thing to get a PG-13 version that he could sell to teens with the expected horrible response. Luckily, a complete print was found and shown as the Gore Edition of the movie. Terrific background stuff and behind the scenes material, that. The movie is almost less interesting that the story of its making and journey to re-release. Almost.

Tammy and the T-Rex might not have been the wunderkind experience if it tried to play things straight. It has a low budget, not enough time to shoot, and it would have been a disaster. Luckily, the movie aims for camp and comedy, never taking itself quite seriously, while giving its audience moments and sequences that are impossible to unsee. Michael and Billy meet and scuffle in the opening flick’s scenes. The shoving, punching mask escalates when Billy decides to grab Michael’s crotch and squeeze, and Michael does not take the high road. Instead, he grabs Billy’s dick through his pants and returns the favor. It’s a game of groin grinding chicken about who will let go first. When the Sheriff’s men arrive, Norville (the always enjoyable Buck Flower) gets to deliver the lines, “Billy, you let go of that boy’s gonads! You know the school has a restraining order against you!” Yep, this is that kind of movie. Or, later on, while on the run from the authorities, the star-crossed lovers escape into the wilderness in a most unexpected fashion: Tammy rides into the trees on the back of her T-ray while the skies overhead are ablaze with the riotous colors of their passion—as well as the smoke of the wildfires rushing into their area. If those two ideas give you a cheery little grin, then this is possibly the movie for you. If those two descriptions make you wrinkle your nose, then you’re probably not going to enjoy Tammy and the T-Rex‘s ribald comedy, its gruesome antics, or its bizarre love story; give it a try if you’re feeling adventurous or just move along.

Though the screenplay is pretty out there, it moves along at a fast clip. We get young love interrupted, weird science strangeness, brain extraction surgery performed with the wrongest tool imaginable, a robotic dinosaur on the rampage, hopes to get Michael a new body (along with the bizarre lengths Tammy and Byron go to try and make that happen), to a final showdown between the unsympathetic law and a couple of star-crossed lovers mashed together in a plot that races through its ninety-minute running time.

Some of the actors are doing their best to one up each other for how over the top they can go. Terry Kiser gets major kudos for playing a mad scientist who seems truly manic. Likewise Ellen Dubin balances manic facial expressions, libidinous abandon, and a surprising left hook in fascinating ways; as well, she gets to roll up one of the flattened corpses in need of disposal like it’s a sleeping bag. George Pilgrim turns up the homicidal bad boy to 11 with relish, while Sean Whalen gets to gawk and grin like a psychotic jester. John Franklin actually cackles a couple of times, while his character delivers soto voce commentary about his estimations of boss Dr. Wachenstein’s competence.

The cinematography from Roger Olkowski is what we might expect from a low budget flick from the 1980s/1990s. Clean images that deliver solid information about who is doing what and when and to whom. However, these visuals include only practical effects, none of the CGI that would go on to define a large percentage of that decade’s genre output. Of course, the animatronic dinosaur is something of an oddity as it moves, walks, squishes people, disembowels the occasional hood, or plays charades with the love of its life to let her know whose brain is inside that robotic skull. However, that’s part and parcel of the film’s charms.

In fact, despite a lackluster original performance at the box office (probably not helped by a sanitizing of the film from an R to a PG-13 rating), Tammy and the T-Rex proves itself to be a flick with some serious chops (and chomps) when viewed in its original splendor. There is a creative energy at play behind the feature, a wonderful sense of absurdity and a sense of honest wonder at its own material. The humor is there to undercut any pretentiousness, but the humor also works with other genre elements to give us an honest appraisal of teenage rebelliousness in the face of clueless authorities (parents/guardians), meanspirited bullies, prejudicial law enforcement, as well as shady researchers with corporate ties. At the heart of the movie is friendship and unfettered love, two emotions that will seldom outlast the rugged college and job-hunting oriented twenties. The movie is both as plucky and as insightful into teen/adult dynamics as a classic John Hughes flick. This one just happens to have a sf/horror bend, a topic Hughes was not really interested in or qualified to handle well (sure, 1985’s Weird Science is a fun teen romcom, but it sucks as sf).

Tammy and the T-Rex might not be high budget filmmaking, but it’s got terrific amounts of heart, spirit, and quite a few laughs. With the gore stuff restored, it also has some delightful mayhem on display as well. On its own, the movie is a delightful escape from the everyday. When seen in light of its own backstory, it’s a miracle of a movie, a thing that makes more sense and has more going for it than a production of this speed and scale ought. Maybe it was a launch system for Paul Walker and Denise Richards back in the day, but since its restoration and re-release, the film has proven to be something much, much more interesting than that. It’s an honest little cult sensation.

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Tammy and the T-Rex is available in DVD/Blu-ray combo edition and a streaming edition.

Tomorrow, we jump over into a very different experience: 1986’s Vamp. This is the touching story of a couple of dudebros looking for a stripper who go Down There and encounter Grace Jones and her cadre of vampire gangsters and dancers. Gedde Watanabe and an all but silent Grace Jones pretty much steal the show. It’s available in DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming editions.

Writing for “You Never Forget Your First: Tammy and the T-Rex” is copyright © 2021 by Daniel R. Robichaud.

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Physical media is also available from other distributors like Diabolik DVD as well as boutique label Vinegar Syndrome’s website.